Longtime California residents know that terra firma isn’t so firm after all. Iris Jamahl Dunkle invites us into the mind of a newcomer facing that reality. Her poem “Interrupted Geography” dwells on the differences between geographical places, and how to come to terms with those differences when they’re manifested in our everyday awareness of the world — where the ground actually shifts beneath our feet. It seems to me the poem suggests that landscape is psychological as well as geographical. Throughout her three books, Dunkle exhibits passionate interest in history and nature. I like experiencing, through this poem, her initiation into a landscape with an entirely new history, natural habitat and seismology.

Each day shifts its weight against plates of time. New month opens like the mouth of a dip-slip: fissures from which we arise still blinking and haunted by the past. What got me here?

Did chance land me in this other landscape?And if so, how do I tell it? I don’t know the species of trees or birds. Stories that whisper from the grey river just come apart in my hands when I kneel at its muddy banks, trying to gather them up.

Still, I can’t lose the education of earthquakes. What’s under me now may (no, will) rise up, so best to get to know it.

“Interrupted Geography” is from “Interrupted Geographies” (c) 2017 by Iris Jamahl Dunkle. The poem appears with the permission of Trio House Press Inc. All rights reserved.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the poet laureate of Sonoma County. Her poetry books include “Gold Passage” and “There’s a Ghost in This Machine of Air.”

David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.